


qualify me for a part in your dream

by hedgebitch



Series: a savior's a nuisance to live with at home [3]
Category: Batgirl (2009), DC Extended Universe
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Bisexual Female Character, Blüdhaven, Coffee Shops, Gen, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Teen Angst
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-09
Updated: 2020-03-10
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:53:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22633012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hedgebitch/pseuds/hedgebitch
Summary: Gotham needs a Robin. Stephanie Brown needs Gotham. Of course, it’s not nearly as easy a solution as it sounds—it never is. Stephanie Brown in the Snyderverse—can be read as a standalone.
Relationships: Crystal Brown & Stephanie Brown, Eventual Stephanie Brown/Carrie Kelley, Stephanie Brown & Jason Todd
Series: a savior's a nuisance to live with at home [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1562239
Comments: 2
Kudos: 13





	1. in the shadow she crawls

**Author's Note:**

> steph is my favourite character in this entire au and i feel bad for every bad thing i’ve done to her. if you’re reading this as a standalone all you need to know is dick went by renegade instead of nightwing on account of. not knowing superman and all

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> trigger warnings for chapter one: implied child death, brief allusions to an emotionally abusive relationship  
> chapter title from girl by tori amos

Stephanie Brown doesn’t just know Gotham. She is Gotham.

She starts out her life as Cluemaster’s kid, but she doesn’t stay that way for long, not with the way the streets call out to her at night.

Becoming Spoiler is the easiest thing she’s ever done. She’s thirteen and angry, so so angry—at her dad, at the world, at everyone in it—but not at Gotham, never at Gotham. 

The tools at her disposal aren't nearly as high tech as the ones she hears her dad talking about the Bat using. But she does learn to use Google Chrome in incognito when she looks up sewing tutorials, so that neither of her parents can see her browser history. And—well, okay, she feels super bad about it, but she also steals this cool pocket knife thingy from one of the more tourist-oriented shops in a nicer part of town than she usually frequents.

Perks of having parents too busy working to take care of you: curfew is really more of a suggestion than a rule, so you pretty much have time to get to any part of town you want.

Anyway, by the time she’s figured out enough of the Cluemaster’s plans to foil—to _spoil_ them, that is—she’s turned fourteen, and it’s starting to look like Robin has, too. Which is a joke about how the first Robin graduated or whatever and got replaced by some scrappy new kid.

He’s Gotham, too—at least, that’s what Steph’s heard. The henchfolk are always grumbling about the nerve some street rat’s got to be running around in the Bat’s shadow. 

It’s dumb, but the first thing Steph thinks, her first reaction to hearing that Robin is _like her_ —it’s jealousy, plain and simple. The Bat’s a smart dude. He’s gotta know about Cluemaster’s daughter. How come some kid from Crime Alley was worth saving and she wasn’t?

The good news, though, is baby bird’s still a little slow to figure out how to use all his gear. Cluemaster goes to meet up with a couple other rogues one night, and Steph nearly gasps and gives her own hiding place away when she sees the Bat pop in for some of his own recon. She’s sure he’s spotted her anyway—until Robin slips on his entry, and she gets the chance to sneak away as an impromptu fight breaks out below.

She sits, still as a statue, on a fire escape in the alley outside, so she’s got a great view of Batman and Robin as they make their escape overhead. Robin’s gotten hurt in the scuffle, it seems—the Bat has to grab him to keep him from falling when he makes a clumsy miss with his grapple-y thingy—and the grappler itself isn’t as lucky. 

Steph sees the little flash that brightens up the alley for a split second when it happens, but she figures it’s some kind of Bat-tech-thing and doesn’t pay it too much mind.

Steph learns to fly the same day she meets Robin for real.

Or, well, night. Because that’s when the Bats come out. 

Batman’s got some case he must be working with Batgirl, plus it’s a Sunday, so Steph isn’t expecting to see Robin at all. The new Robin almost never comes out on Sundays. At first she thought maybe it was something religious, but then she overheard Batgirl talking to Catwoman about tutoring him that one time, and realized he’s probably just got lots of homework. 

Most of the grownups don’t really notice Spoiler slinking around Gotham. She blends into the brick like camo. So Steph overhears a _lot_ of important stuff like that. Some of the things Catwoman says, she’d rather just forget. 

She’s on her way home from looking in on Cluemaster—she’s _so_ close, so close to figuring out how to stop it all—when she comes across two goons accosting some twerp with a camera in a back alley—Steph’ll eat her socks if he’s older than twelve.

It’s a good thing it’s only two of ‘em bugging him, ‘cause she manages to take them out without too much trouble. If there’d been a third, Mister Photographer might’ve been done for, and Spoiler right alongside him.

She gets a much better look at him once she’s saved him, and realizes he’s gotta be even younger than twelve. And the clothing’s nice enough to suggest his parents aren’t exactly from this part of town.

“You’re Spoiler, right?” he asks her, and it’s nice to have a fan and all, but he sounds _so_ young.

“How old are you?” Steph blurts out, which he ignores in favour of handing her a photo print and a shoebox she hadn’t realized he’d been carrying.

“You need it more than they need it back,” he tells her, then scampers right off before she can stop him.

The photo is from the night the rogues met up, the night the Bat almost caught her—taken from the same fire escape she was hiding out on, maybe two levels up if she had to guess from the angle. It’s taken at the exact moment Robin missed his shot, and it’s funny as shit, so Steph pockets it for later.

The box has something way more valuable than any silly photograph inside it. It’s scuffed up to hell and back from its fall, and Steph’s sure Batman’ll have a new model out in like, twenty minutes, but it’s worth its weight in gold all the same: Robin’s dropped grappler.

Steph’s seen the Bats on patrol enough times to know they use two, but she’s a pro when it comes to making do, and besides. She’d never have been able to make even one by herself.

She’d been on her way home before, but…the new toy is just too tempting to resist. She spends fifteen minutes or so figuring out how to work the release just right, so she doesn’t go splat on her first attempt, then a good half hour leaping between buildings, making believe she’s been sent on a mission by the Bat. 

Most of her landings are clumsy and noisy, so she takes a pause from her monologue to internally congratulate herself for the first one she sticks—and then internally congratulates herself even more when she realizes she’s not alone on this rooftop. Sitting next to a gargoyle in the far corner, rambling quietly to himself about someone named Riley, is the boy wonder himself. 

Oh, crap. He’s gonna think she’s spying and then he’ll call Batman who’ll, like, perform a citizen’s arrest on her or whatever the heck it is he does. Thinking quickly, Steph pitches herself forwards as if she’d just missed the jump.

Oof. A little _too_ realistic a fall, she realizes as the cement shreds the knees of her leggings and also the knees of her…knees.

“That,” Robin says, staring at her from his perch. “isn’t yours.”

He’s looking at the grappler in her hand. Well. If he thinks she’s giving it back he’s got another think coming.

“Finders keepers, bird brain,” she tells him, and sticks out her tongue. 

Robin, to his credit, takes this in stride, merely shrugging. 

“Where’s Bats?” she asks. He probably wouldn’t tell her if he’s called the big guy in, but. Maybe he’s as bad at lying as he is at holding onto his gear.

She’s not sure how she can tell that Robin’s raising an eyebrow at her under his domino, but he totally is.

“Well, there’s a lit cigarette in my hand,” he informs her, and she looks down to see that, holy shit, Robin is in fact smoking a cigarette. “So, with any luck, nowhere near here.”

“How old are you?” Steph demands, for the second time tonight, because there’s no way this kid should be smoking.

“How old are _you_?” he retorts, and he’s certainly got her there.

Each of them stares the other down. They answer at the same time.

“Sixteen.”

“No way you’re sixteen,” Steph tells him.

“Why not?”

“Cause no way you’re older than me!” Steph declares, then promptly realizes her mistake. Whoops.

Robin grins in a way that says maybe he’s more cut out for this job than the henchfolk and rogues and Steph all seem to think, and takes a drag from his cigarette.

“There’s the rub.”

“Are you, uh,” Stephanie tries not to fidget. She’s totally not scared of some dumb kid barely even her age, and with way worse fashion sense. “Are you gonna tell Bats on me?”

“I’m not a fuckin’ narc,” Robin says, sounding genuinely offended.

Steph frowns. “How do you know I’m not a bad guy, though?”

“‘Cause Gotham knows Gotham,” he shrugs. “Don’t go telling any of the adults I didn’t yell at you, though.”

It seems like a fair enough exchange, but Steph still waits for him to finish his cigarette so she can make him take off a glove to spit shake on it.

As it turns out, you don’t actually need a twelve-to-fourteen year old boy to narc for you when you’re the world’s greatest detective, or whatever, because Batman finds Spoiler anyway, and tries to stop her.

He’s kind of a total jerk. Steph remembers how Robin sounded on that rooftop—just like all the kids she goes to school with—and feels bad thinking about how this is what he has to deal with all the time.

She ends up yelling at him. Actual honest-to-god yelling at the freaking Bat. About how hard she’d worked, about how close she is to finishing, about how she wants to be the one to put Cluemaster away for good.

“This isn’t your fight, Spoiler,” he has the nerve to tell her.

“Of course it’s my fight,” she tells him, tells the goddamn Batman right to his face. “He _made_ it my fight when he decided all for himself that I would just stand by and let him win, like a _good_ little girl. He _made_ it my fight when he made _me_ , don’t you get it?”

The agreement they come to isn’t entirely unbearable. Batman and Renegade take the henchfolk out, but they let Spoiler take the lead on capturing Cluemaster. The credit is all hers: she even gets to stand on the rooftop of the GCPD with Batman and Robin, while Commissioner Gordon and some rookie cop confirm that Cluemaster’s made it safely to Blackgate.

But once they’re done with the cops, Batman breaks through the security codes in Wayne Tower, hands her a change of civilian clothes, and waits for her outside the bathroom. Because that was the other part of the deal: that once Cluemaster was in prison, Steph would never go out as Spoiler again.

Batman offers her a ride home in the Batmobile—she only accepts because she doesn’t think she can stand the memories of flying while she makes the walk—and Robin shouts a quick, “Bye, Stephanie!” as he calls a motorcycle out of what feels like nowhere to give her his seat in the car. It’s the last time she’ll ever see him.

Steph goes home to her mom and tries not to cry when she dreams about a hero decked out in red, yellow, and green, with golden blonde hair flowing over the top of her cape and Batman at her side.

She cries all the same, though, because at the end of the day, Stephanie Brown is Gotham. And Gotham needs Robin.

Steph cries when she loses Spoiler, cries on and off for two whole days, and then decides she’s had enough and she’s never going to cry again.

There are other ladders out of the Bowery. She starts by trying extra hard in school. East Gotham High School isn’t exactly prime college admissions material, but Gotham University’s got programs exactly for people like her. People who want out.

Well, technically the pamphlets mostly say things like “Students from low income backgrounds who excel academically.” Which means Steph’s gotta study her butt off for SATs, but _then_ it’ll be for her. She’ll make it hers if that’s what she has to do. 

And she does. She does every homework assignment, even the ones that don’t get graded at all. She fills the time after school she used to spend plotting against Cluemaster going to every extracurricular East Gotham will let her join. She forgives and forgets when she hears kids in the halls boasting about spotting Robin in the shadows of streetlights—even if she never stops looking up at rooftops, when she walks home at night and no one’s around to catch her.

Steph doesn’t even realize Robin’s missing until she gets back to school after summer break. There’s whispers on the streets, of course, but Steph doesn’t really hear the same kind of rumours she did wearing purple, and besides. Dean’s from Midway—he _really_ doesn’t like talking about the Bats. 

By the time October sets in and there still haven’t been any sightings of Renegade outside of Blüdhaven, everyone knows that something must’ve happened to the dynamic duo, something must have happened to Robin, because the Bat appears to be in the process of fucking losing it. 

Steph thinks about him sometimes. Robin, that is. Dean does too, even—wouldn’t acknowledge a living bird, but he’s perfectly willing to gossip about a dead one, it seems. But Steph doesn’t exactly think about him the way the other kids her age do. 

She’s never been walked home by the friendly neighbourhood traffic light, or pulled out of a burning building, or talked down from the Trigate Bridge. But she does remember the boy on the rooftop, trying to sound older than he was. The boy who skipped Sunday patrols to do homework, and called her by her name, and all she can do is hope like hell he got out. 

Maybe he’s graduating early—boy wonder, boy genius, same difference—and that’s what’s got Batman so pissy. Maybe he’s got a scholarship to somewhere way better than Gotham University: somewhere Ivy League, with dumb rich frat boys who hear about the crime-fighting Boy Wonder and think it’s just a joke, a story for poor people to tell their kids.

But Steph knows better than most anyone that Robin is more than a story, more than a hero, even. Robin’s a kid—someone’s kid. A kid who doesn’t want his dad to catch him smoking, who talks to statues when no one else is around. A kid with a dad who cares about him, about protecting him from everything the world throws. So Steph knows that there’s no way Robin’s dead.

A selfish part of her hopes Batman gave up on him, though. Threw him back to Gotham the same way he threw her, without mercy or regret.


	2. waiting on a time or a place to change

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> trigger warnings for chapter 2: teen pregnancy, drug abuse mention, continued allusions to abusive relationships/child death (he'll get better eventually)  
> chapter title from urge to purge by charly bliss.
> 
> dear my singular reader: if this feels like filler that's cause it is bc i needed to establish a lot of world/backstory for what comes next. hope you enjoy anyways!

Not too long after Robin dies—no, disappears. No grave, no body, no death—Steph finds herself taking a break. An approximately nine month long one. Dean fucks off to the midwest, the lucky bastard, and Steph goes alone to a hospital to have his kid.

She lies to social services, of course, tells every member of the hospital staff that asks, every nurse, hell, she even tells her mother that she doesn’t know who the father is. No way she’s risking an adoption not going through just ‘cause some bastard in Midway won’t pick up the phone.

Well, of course, there’s more to it than that. Crystal Brown might have been too—too distracted to notice her daughter coming home from dates hiding bruises, to notice how Steph had stopped wearing yellow because Dean didn’t like how much it drew attention to her, but she knew her daughter was seeing someone in specific, so Steph isn’t too surprised when her mom, in a rare moment of sobriety, tells Steph in tears how she’d always wanted better for her.

(Crystal is nearly caught stealing from West Mercy a week later, and she sits down with Steph to tell her all about how she’s going to try harder, how she’s going to be better. How she wants Stephanie to be better, too, because the only thing that scares her worse than where she’s headed is the thought that her daughter, her baby, might end up hurtling down the same path. 

Steph screams at her in the moment, but apologizes the very next day. They come to an agreement they can barely afford: Steph will find someone to…someone to talk to about Dean, if Crystal will find NA meetings to attend that work with her schedule.)

Steph meets with a couple from Boston a month before the due date. The Fuchs make a nice pair: Savannah, who was born in Gotham and came back to be closer to her aging mother, and Liza, who’d been working as a public relations specialist for a startup back in Boston, and has now found herself most of the way through a master’s at GU. They seem kind, and responsible, and, most importantly, super ready for this. It does hurt, though, even more than Steph had expected, to think about her child being raised by some strange city when they inevitably move back.

Savannah and Liza ask her for conditions, for wishes, for anything, and the only thing that comes to mind leaves such a bittersweet feeling hanging over Stephanie’s heart that she almost doesn’t say it at all.

But she thinks about the nostalgic envy of seeing a hero who talked like her, remembers the boy no one bothered to grieve, and she swallows back the bitter to ask her daughter’s mothers if they won’t mind taking a name suggestion.

Robin is never going to be Gotham, not the way Stephanie is, but she will be able to carry the tiniest bit of Stephanie out of Gotham with her.

When she gets back to school and has to face the gossip head-on once again, all she can feel is relief that a Robin will finally escape Batman’s city for good. The big guy’s doing worse than ever. There’s still freshmen joining up with gangs and henching’s no less a career prospect for graduating seniors, but talk of “Bat-brands” has kids keeping their extracurriculars way on the downlow. 

Steph’s grades made a pretty substantial drop last year, but she still managed a 2130 on her SATs, and she’s trying, she really is. Only, everything in school is piling up, and her mom is—her mom is not in a great place, plus Steph got the Batburger job back that she’d had to give up last spring, and they really need her working more hours, and. There’s just so many things going on.

And then in November the Bat’s violence peaks and…and Superman dies. It’s the first day in a month Crystal hasn’t been called in for an emergency shift at the hospital, and with the Bat so busy in Metropolis, the police are enforcing a city-wide curfew that’s got Steph’s work schedule shot to hell, so she’s home to sit on the living room couch with her mom and watch the news coverage.

Superman dies live on CNN, and god, Steph wants to believe Batman can come back from this. Some part of her has always known, from the moment she first wore Spoiler’s cape, the all-encompassing love Gotham inspires in those willing to fight for her. Some part of her has always known she was one of a select few who would ever get to feel it, that no matter what he told her or what he did, when it comes to Gotham, Stephanie Brown knows just as much Batman.

But the CNN cameras aren’t showing the narrow alleyways or dingy rooftops of the Bowery; they’re relaying footage of a wrecked Metropolis, and Steph finds herself voicing out loud what she’s been thinking all these years.

“I can’t live in a city he’s running,” she says.

“Better the Bat than anyone else,” her mom responds, and Steph wishes with an aching, burning longing that she could still agree. 

Renegade. Robin. Batgirl. Hell, fucking Superman. No one else seems to see the pattern, but Steph knows it for what it is; she’s too smart, too well-versed in the whole shebang not to know better. 

Stephanie Brown might have survived, but a part of her died for good the day she gave up Spoiler. It doesn’t matter if they’re walking around in broad daylight or buried six feet deep; Batman’s got a trail of bodies in his wake a mile long, and she’s not planning on sticking around to watch it grow.

She gets home from work on the last day of school before Thanksgiving break, and waits patiently in the kitchen for her mom to get back, too.

“Hi, baby,” Crystal greets her softly when she gets in around one in the morning. “Why’re you still up?”

Steph swallows back the tears. She’s been rehearsing this for the past week, she’s going to get the words out, she _has_ to get the words out.

“I’m—Mom, I’m not going back to school.”

Her mom lets her cry it out that night, but in the morning, she’s already got a whole host of reasons trying to push Stephanie not to “give up on her education.”

“I can’t stay here, Mom. This city is toxic,” Steph tries to explain.

“That’s what the gas masks are for,” Crystal insists in response.

“It’s not just the air, it’s—the feelings, the history.”

“Steph, baby, I know—I know we’ve been through a lot, I know you’ve been through a lot here, but do you really…you don’t really think it’s Gotham’s fault, do you?”

“Of course it’s not her fault,” Steph tells her mom, tears in her eyes. “That’s why I have to leave.”

Her mom doesn’t get it. Steph isn’t really expecting her to. She sits down with Steph to help anyway, though: they come up with a budget, a timeline. 

By the end of the week, Steph’s got a plan arranged. She starts waitressing full time, and tacks on a second job working part time at the coffee shop just down the street from her Batburger. Crystal refuses to let her go without savings and her own insurance plan, and Steph refuses to let her mom pay the rent on her own in the meantime.

Steph has no way of knowing it, but she moves to Blüdhaven the same day the Fuchs move back to Boston. 

Rent’s a bit higher in Blüdhaven (perks of living in the Bowery: it’s hard to gentrify a neighbourhood that consists solely of the gang members you employ to run it) but Steph isn’t exactly looking for a spacious place, so she’s perfectly content with the first studio apartment she comes across that’s not filled with roaches or covered in mold.

(She’d had to google what to avoid while apartment shopping in Blüdhaven: there was all this weird shit about not buying a place with obvious bloodstains that her Gotham friends had laughed their asses off at.)

Her coffee shop lets her transfer over to one of their Blüdhaven locations without a fuss, and pops her on shifts mostly with John and Agnes, respectively a De Witt University student and a woman so old Steph nearly believes him when John tells her she’s been around since before the whale trade died out. 

Two weeks into her new life in Blüdhaven, Steph finds herself about to lose her mind on the phone with her mom.

“Have you found a therapist yet?” Crystal asks her, as if that’s a perfectly normal thing to say when your daughter has picked up her phone during a union-mandated fifteen minute break expecting a major emergency.

“Can I call you back later?”

“I’m working tonight, baby. Did you find one? I sent you the address for one that your insurance should—”

“He wasn’t accepting new patients,” Steph reminds her for the fourth time, which is _way too many times, in Steph’s opinion. _

__

“Are you sure? Did you call?”

__

“The website said “we are not accepting patients at this time,” so no, I did not call, mom.”

__

Crystal sighs on the other end of the phone and Steph immediately feels immeasurable guilt.

__

“I’m sorry, baby, I’m just worried about you.”

__

“I know, mom. Sorry.”

__

Crystal moves on to asking about her apartment and how decorating’s been going. Steph hasn’t super been prioritizing that, but she’s done a little bit of garbage with some pillowcases and pictures and stuff, so she happily relays some info about that particular area of progress, then turns the conversation on to what’s been happening at West Mercy.

__

__

“My daughter-in-law is a therapist,” Agnes supplies helpfully once Steph hangs up the phone. “She accepts patients.”

__

“That’s nice,” Steph says, attempting to feign appreciation for the unwarranted assistance.

__

“Micha’s wife—you remember Micha, yes?”

__

“Oh, yeah, Micha! I remember…Micha.” 

__

Steph can’t even remember if Micha is a man or a woman. Probably would’ve stuck out to her if they hadn’t been either, though.

__

__

A plump woman wearing a pink blouse and slacks walks up to the counter just after Agnes has clocked out for a late lunch break and left Steph alone to cover the register and the bar. 

__

“Hi! You the new girl?” she asks, and Steph quickly adds her face to her internal list of regulars.

__

“Transferred here two weeks ago from Gotham,” Steph responds cheerfully. 

__

Okay, maybe she is so lacking in decent socialization that a polite evening customer’s about to get her entire life story. So what?

__

“You’ll probably be seeing me around, then—I work nearby and like to steal Agnes’ discount. I’m Angie, by the way.”

__

Steph creates a new mental file, labels it “friends and family,” and pops Angie’s face in there. 

__

“Nice to meetcha! What can I get you?”

__

“Fair warning, it’s a long one,” Angie tells her, then rattles off what’s gotta be a frequent order. “A medium coffee, no room, a large pumpkin spice latte with one pump white mocha, extra hot, and a medium white hot chocolate with peppermint and whipped cream, also extra hot—if I could get that with a second cup instead of a sleeve, I promise Agnes won’t tell corporate.”

__

She waits for Steph to grab a cup for each drink before giving the next, which is a welcome change of pace from Gotham, where even the regulars just wanna get the fuck out and go back home.

__

“Alrighty, see you in two minutes,” Steph announces cheerfully as she turns to grab a handful of pitchers, after Angie has scanned her card and Steph’s handed her a black coffee.

__

Angie sips the coffee as she waits, and Steph’s just finishing off the hot chocolate—yeah, okay, maybe she’s added the shaved chocolate topping for the peppermint mocha free of charge, but it’s not like the store manager is there to see her—when Agnes returns from the break room. She sees Angie, and immediately skips any customary greeting in favor of turning on Stephanie.

__

“Stephanie! This is Micha’s wife. Angie, you take new patients, yes? Stephanie spends all her breaks on her phone, with her mother always telling her to find a psychiatrist.”

__

“Mutti!” Angie scolds Agnes, who waves it off.

__

“No, no, don’t yell at me. I am only increasing the productivity of my fellow employees.”

__

And with that, Agnes scampers off to restock, leaving Stephanie alone in what is definitely a contender for the most mortifying situation she’s ever been in _ever_.

__

“I’m, uh. I don’t need—I mean, it’s uh,” she stutters, trying to find an easy way out of this conversation from hell.

__

“Complicated?” Angie asks with a wry smile. 

__

Agnes has definitely pulled this bullshit more than once before, if that expression’s anything to go by. Steph pops the hot chocolate into a tray, PSL in the opposite slot so it’ll at least be sort of balanced, and sets it out on the counter as she responds, attempting to defend herself.

__

“I don’t need meds or anything, just someone to talk to.”

__

“There’s nothing wrong with needing meds,” Angie says as she pops her half-drunk coffee into one of the empty slots in the tray. “If you’re struggling with insurance, you could always look at some community support groups. Could I get some of those green stopper thingies?”

__

“Oh, for sure, my bad,” Steph says, quickly grabbing three and handing them over with a smile.

__

Another customer walks in as Angie finishes up, but the seed’s been planted in Steph’s head and mindlessly pulling espresso shots is as good a fertilizer as any.

__

She goes home that night still thinking about it, but closing shifts are kind of exhausting, so she makes a note on her phone and collapses into bed.

__

__

Steph’s got the next day off, so she sleeps in and makes herself pancakes because who the fuck else is gonna make her pancakes, and goddamnit, she deserves some pancakes.

__

Once the pancakes are done, and once the pancake dishes are put away—well, okay, once everything but the pan has been put on the towel next to the sink, and the pan’s been filled with hot water for future Steph to deal with—then, she finally turns her attention to the to-do list on her phone, where at the very bottom, she’d quickly written “group?”

__

Well, okay, technically it says “gloop?” because she’d been typing quickly and hadn’t bothered to fix the autocorrect.

__

She doesn’t actually have a laptop—she’d shared the desktop computer with her mom back in Gotham—so she pulls up the browser on her phone to do some very intensive research.

__

She googles “Blüdhaven local support groups” and clicks on the first link that comes up—a directory of like, pretty much literally everything. Research done.

__

She picks a couple of the options that probably apply to her based on what the therapist in Gotham had said—she’ll have to call a couple of the parent organizations anyways, she figures, before she finds one where it won’t be super crazy weird for someone as young as her to be going completely on her own.

__

Just for shits and giggles, Steph decides to see if she can find Angie’s practice. Searching “Angie psychiatrist Blüdhaven” isn’t super helpful, until she remembers how Angie said she worked near the coffee shop. She pulls up Google maps instead, and zooms in on the nearby blocks.

__

She finds Angie’s practice two blocks over, and pulls up the website. It looks…super fancy. Well, okay, not, like, Beyonce fancy, but fancy enough that there’s no way Steph would be able to afford her rates out of pocket. It was nice of Angie not to point that out to Agnes in the shop.

__

__

A week or so later, she sees Angie again. It’s a Saturday, and Steph’s working the morning shift with John today—he’s been complaining nonstop about some assignment he can’t stand and how none of his groupmates are even trying, and Steph’s wasting wayyyy too much energy trying to mmhmm and nod in all the right places and not be irritated at all about how he’s complaining about an opportunity Steph would kill to have.

__

Angie looks frazzled, and feels frazzled, too, if the cup John hands over to Steph is anything to go by—she ordered a large black coffee with three shots of espresso. And on a weekend, too—maybe something to do with the mysterious Micha that Steph still can’t remember ever on god’s green earth meeting?

__

Steph heads to the bar to pull the shots and calls out “JFK for Angie,” when she’s done, because there’s enough customers loitering around that she doesn’t want the drink getting lost or, god forbid, appropriated by a Karen.

__

“Thanks, Stephanie,” Angie says, looking genuinely appreciative as she grabs the cup, and chugs a third of it without even adding a stevia packet. Brave soul.

__

That’s actually it for their interaction, but it stays on Steph’s mind all day. The first group she’s picked, one for physical abuse and domestic violence victims, has a meeting in the church right down the block, so she leaves her uniform and bag in the break room and heads over.

__

It goes—it goes okay. She doesn’t really talk, not about anything relevant anyways, but it’s still nice to have a reminder that there are people in the world with problems closer to hers, that there are people with problems beyond how their parents will be upset if they have to repeat Bio a third time because they keep ditching Friday evening labs to party, _John._

__

Steph gets back to the coffee shop around 6:30, and is surprised to find Angie there, sitting at a table and looking—well, honestly, looking even worse than earlier.

__

“You okay?” Steph asks her, because Angie does not look entirely okay.

__

“I’m fine, Stephanie. Just…made a judgement error, is all.”

__

“Steph,” Steph corrects her. “Is it work stuff?”

__

“I’m afraid it’s unethical for me to offer much in the way of gossip,” Angie tells her, which sounds like a yes to Steph.

__

“You could be vague?” Steph suggests. 

__

Angie nods. “Alright, well, sometimes in my line of work, my patients make bad decisions or find themselves in bad situations. And sometimes, especially when I realize I’ve overlooked something, even though I know it’s ultimately not my doing, I feel guilty—like I’ve failed that patient.”

__

_Okay, Steph. You’re not super qualified here,_ she tells herself.

__

“…you know what comes guilt free?”

__

“What?” Angie asks.

__

Steph’s inside voice screams _abort abort abort_ , but her outside voice cheerfully advertises, “Our limited time sugar-free nonfat chestnut praline latte!”

__

Angie laughs, so it wasn’t an entirely horrific blunder, even if she doesn’t immediately run to the register to order a CPL.

__

They talk for a bit longer, and Steph remembers to thank Angie for her suggestion and tell her the group’s working out so far just in case maybe that’ll count as a win. Their conversation doesn’t last too long; Angie has Micha (whoever they are) to get back to, and the store manager, Madison, is on bar and fusses at Steph when she realizes she’s still hanging around.

__

**Author's Note:**

> work title from some say by melanie. i was gonna wait til i finished this to post it but birds of prey had me thinking about steph and so here it is In Progress
> 
> feel free to harass me on tumblr @[nightflings](https://nightflings.tumblr.com/) if you want me to post more of this


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